DATA

Leveraging Intent Data for Actionable Marketing

By Ascend Marketing

August 16, 2021 | DATA

Data is one of the biggest buzzwords in marketing right now. Every organization is aiming to collect as much data on their customers as they can to try to better understand them. Better understand their needs and expectations and leverage that data into actionable campaigns for conversion and engagement. Organizations understand the crucial need for utilizing data for segmentation. Gartner reports that by the end of 2022, more than 70% of B2B marketers will utilize third-party intent data to target prospects or engage groups of buyers in selected accounts. It is important to note though that while data is an invaluable resource, it must be sought out and used effectively to make a significant impact. Intent data provides a first-hand view into a consumer’s actions and allows organizations to more effectively communicate with their customers.

What is Intent Data?

When buyers identify a problem or a need within their lives, they do online research to find a solution. This early research allows them to explore and often narrow down their options before organizations have even had a chance to connect with them. Therefore, you are potentially out of the buyer’s mind before they even know about your organization. Now imagine if you knew your prospects were researching a solution like yours shortly after they started the process. This is where intent data can support the process.

Intent data provides insights derived from customers’ online behaviors and allows organizations to identify the likelihood of an individual’s intent to purchase a particular product or service. A customer’s online behavior includes any engagement with content, competitors, events, influencers, or social media — any activity that indicates research and potential purchase on the customer’s behalf. Zoominfo reports that 78% of organizations believe data-driven marketing leads to increased conversion and customer acquisition rates. Utilizing this level of data and insights about consumers allows organizations to reach buyers much earlier in the customer journey, allowing the organization to guide the decision-making process before a competitor even knows about their prospects’ interests.

Why is Intent Data Important?

Given the abundance of data and insights organizations can collect on their customers, the opportunity to develop strong relationships exists. Organizations now have the capability to create a seamless buying experience by addressing customer’s problems with a concrete solution. Intent data can equip organizations with crucial information regarding their consumers like their interests and needs to make for a more personalized experience.

The following are some of the benefits of utilizing intent data for marketing purposes:

  • Understanding your audience better

By capturing more details about your audience, your organization can develop a more holistic view of who your consumer truly is. This will also show you what type of content they may be interested in seeing based on behavioral data.

  • Shorter sales cycle through an improved buying experience

Your organization will be able to identify leads better and offer better buying experiences to those who need your product or service the most. The content you publish will catch the attention of decision-makers. By developing user-specific content you can experience improvements in open and conversion rates as well as faster return on investment.

  • Increase win rates

Because you know which consumers you should be targeting and what they’re looking for, marketing resources can be focused on active buyers. Research performed by McKinsey found that organizations that leverage customer behavior data to generate behavioral insights outperform peers by 85% in sales growth. Spending resources and focusing on active buyers allows both the marketing and sales team to be more efficient in their efforts to boosts close rates.

Collecting Intent Data

Content engagement is one of the most important elements regarding intent data. It represents a strong signal of buyer intent. Collecting this data can take place in several ways: first-party, second-party, and third-party.

  • First-party intent data is the first-hand information you collect on your known contacts as well as anonymous visitors. An example of some first-party data that is collected includes interactions with your organization's website, emails, and social media channels. This data allows organizations to frame how they should reach out to prospective customers.
  • Second-party intent data is data collected from another company about potential customers. Second-party data tends to come from review sites or publishing networks. This type of data is collected with the consumer permitting the organization to either share or sell their behavior.
  • Third-party intent data is collected and mined about users from all over the Internet. The data is sold to organizations through third-party information vendors. The vendors partner with publisher sites to access the behavioral data of their users.

Using Intent Data

Intent data provides valuable insights to sales and marketing teams that allow them to develop effective go-to-market strategies, advanced and accurate segmentation, and personalized outreach to the right audience. Below are some of the ways organizations are using intent data within their martech stack to improve their marketing campaigns:

  • Dynamically filter outreach lists for accounts that show an active interest.
  • Personalize outreach with resources that match whatever the customers are searching for.
  • Real-time visibility into customer’s actions allowing you to perform more analysis to retain and up-sell customers proactively.

Utilizing intent data in your organization will allow you to better understand your customers and provide them with the experiences they are searching for.

Keep Reading: Leveraging Powerful Data for Advanced Audience Segmentation

Interested in more content related to this topic? Dive deeper into utilizing data to extract actionable insights tied to consumer behavior for audience segmentation strategies. 

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